Among the drafts never to have seen the light of day, there is a third-written piece about so-called Cultural Marxism, a favourite and persistent conspiracy theory starting out in the anti-semitic sewers of the far right and has ingressed into more mainstream conservative thought. Rather than spending time dusting it off and giving it the spit and polish treatment, Aaron Bastani over at Novara Media has supplied the goods instead. In lieu of extensive writing from me this evening, enjoy.
More about the phenomenon of the conspiracy than 'cultural marxism' itself. Interested to see mention of class etc, as I often think of the focus on the isms by the middle class as a way of avoiding discussing class.
ReplyDeletePoint being: the right use it to avoid discussing class, but so does the left. My thesis would be - sexuality, race, gender etc have developed cultural currency among the privileged classes to signal cost-free virtue, and, according to this video, they also provide valuable currency to the right by enabling them to avoid discussing class too!
Effectively the bourgeois left and right are, as usual, different sides of the same coin.
Could only get through a few minutes of this before I lost the will to live.
ReplyDeleteIt's guilt through association.
Islamic Terrorists are muslims. X is a muslim. therefore X is a terrorist. It's clear and obvious nonsense.
«Effectively the bourgeois left and right are, as usual, different sides of the same coin.»
ReplyDeleteIndeed, but they are quite different sides: the whig side is indeed more "progressive" in a liberal sense than the tory side.
The tories who talk about "cultural marxism" are following a simple and common line of argument: whig "cultural liberalism" is to our left (while still being part of the right), the left means "marxists", so they call it "cultural marxism" rather than "cultural liberalism".
In the same way that the New Labour people think of anybody to the left of Gordon Brown a "trot", like J Corbyn. And they had their doubts about Gordon Brown himself being a "trot" in disguise, because of his concern about poverty instead of the aspiration to bigger property prices, my usual quote:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/rachelsylvester/3556538/Brown-and-the-conservatory-building-classes.html
“lthough Mr Brown talks a lot about aspiration, he means it in the sense that people at the bottom of the pile should be able to get to the middle, rather than that those in the middle should aspire to get a little bit further towards the top. [...] He is focusing on what he recently called the “squeezed middle” because he knows that the aspirational voters who supported Tony Blair have turned away from him. But the phrase he has chosen is telling: Gordon is interested in the middle classes only if he thinks they are “squeezed” — and therefore joining the ranks of the poor who have concerned him most for all his life.”
BTW the segment on LaRouche seems quite unfair, as most comments on his insights are. Those insights are quite often interesting and come with a lot of documentation, even if usually quite exaggerated. His point was that "cultural marxism" was an invention of the whig right to distract the populace from economic issues (where the "whig right" is identified as the anglo-venetian financial globalist and malthusian elites). BTW that there are anglo-venetian financial globalist and malthusian elites seems to me fairly indisputable (see the Rhodes Society for one example, but also many overt authors), that they are in partial control of many governments is pretty clear, that they have their own covert "old boys networks" (partially overlapping with the tory ones) too is common knowledge, that they are behind everything is the exaggeration; there are several competing elite factions, they do plot longer term strategies, often at odds with one another, and they often get make big mistakes. The fatal flaw of most conspiracy theorists is that they think that their pet conspiracy has no competition and is run flawlessly.
ReplyDeleteAs to the difference between pre-Enlightenment torysm and later whiggism I am fairly sure that for tories (and especially for "high tories") this is an example of "cultural marxism": "liberté, egalité, fraternité", and that is quite a bit older than marxism.
To some extent the rage against "cultural marxism" is designed to make it appear that the range between right and left goes from right-wing Thatcher, with her tory principles, to left-wing Thatcher, with her whig policies. There Is No Alternative! :-)
How is it that any serious person(let alone would-be "Marxists") take the poseur Bastani seriously?
ReplyDeleteYou call Bastani a poseur and yet praise Pitts and Bolton for writing a "very good book". On that basis, probably not the best judge of who is and who isn't "proper".
ReplyDeletePlease tell me that no one on this Planet is deranged enough to take Jim Denham seriously?
ReplyDeleteBlissex - the idea that the right invented Cultural Marxism to distract the masses is pretty goddam lame, given all the other fricking distractions they have!
Seriously, if the communist revolution can be averted through distractions then it isn't really a big deal is it!
Elements of the right have probably noticed that in certain sections of the academia, university lecturers, teachers, artists etc, some happen to have a left wing or politically correct viewpoint.
Given the right regard any left wing view as tantamount to a mental deficiency (and looking at the shite written by Boffy, carty and Denham its hard to disagree with this) they have to assume that when it is presented in an academic context some sort of conspiracy must be afoot. They simply can't accept that some relatively intelligent people end up with 'liberal' views.
And all the time they ignore all the right wing lecturers and never talk about a conservative conspiracy. maybe because no conservative individual quite has the intellectual power associated with Marxism.
But what scares the right the most is working class people with left wing views, but as things stand right now (and for those looking at this in a future millennium, the star date is 15 September 2020 - the year of that big pandemic thingy) that isn't something they need to lose too much sleep over!
Bastani is good at what he does. Don't have to agree with everything he says - (older people and cognitive decline does not necessarily follow- unless- but perhaps tongue in cheek).
ReplyDeleteAnyway Bastani projects well as critical commentator of our times whether you or I agree with him or not. Always valuable debate, and style presentation is fine.